


Acceptable Vices

by trace_of_scarlet



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-05
Updated: 2011-10-05
Packaged: 2017-10-24 08:23:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/261199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trace_of_scarlet/pseuds/trace_of_scarlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock Holmes has nearly died at least five times since he met John Watson, and he hasn’t told John about any of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Acceptable Vices

**Author's Note:**

> Beta-ed by my friends Susan and Michelle.

Sherlock Holmes has nearly died at least five times since he met John Watson, and he hasn’t told John about any of them. When his rational mind asks him why – and it always does, will do so at least thirteen hundred times (he counted) before he’s begging for the cocaine to shut it up – he tells the skull on the mantelpiece that it’s simply because he doesn’t want John to worry.

(John worries anyway, as Sherlock knows full well: he’s seen the increased lines like a heartbeat monitor on John’s wide forehead, the tightening at the corners of his lips, the illegal service revolver carefully cleaned and under his pillow. And besides, the man isn’t totally dense: there’s the gash left in the table, the blade – too small in the hilt for Sherlock’s hand – hastily kicked under Sherlock’s customary chair.)

(John loves and fears danger so much, he sleeps with it under his pillow.)

Once or twice, in hopes the cocaine cravings would leave him alone (he is accustomed to loneliness), Sherlock has even permitted himself to admit to the skull on the mantelpiece that he doesn’t tell John about these things because he doesn’t want John to think he’s fallible; doesn’t care to allow his new … friend? No, colleague (that’s safer) to imagine the great detective rolling helpless on the floor with an acrobat’s scarf noosed around his throat. Pride, after all, is an acceptable vice.

(But that’s not it, of course, or at least not _entirely_ it, and Sherlock’s brain has never in his life been able to rest until it has ferreted out the answer that truly fits the evidence. His mind keeps whirring, and the cocaine cravings swarm around him like angry bees.)

With the cravings on him he can’t sleep, can barely eat; John’s mouth tightens until Sherlock pretends he’s on a case, anything to stop John _worrying_ although of course it doesn’t work. He can’t bear for John to think badly of him but he can’t bear for John to care about him either: what does that mean?

Sherlock neatly purloins some extra-strength sleeping pills from behind the counter at the nearest chemist’s, just to have something to _do_ , and downs them five at a time without water even though he knows they won’t work, and of course they don’t, just leave him angry and nauseous.

(The cravings howl like the Furies and he plays the violin until he kills it and John and Mrs Hudson and all three other Baker Street lodgers have all lodged multiple ignored complaints, and still he can’t drown them out.)

Still there’s no case – at least, no case that he can accept – and still his mind is buzzing. John’s alternating between voluble worried and silent worried, less and less willing to believe what Sherlock is certain are perfectly adequate lies about his behaviour and mental health, and even Lestrade seems to be wondering what’s got the madman running even wilder than what passes for normal.

(Sherlock nearly dies a sixth time, fighting on Westminster Bridge a mugger whose friend unexpectedly proved to be armed. He doesn’t tell John about that, either.)

Weeks down the line, and even pickpocketing Lestrade – even baiting his older brother, for heaven’s sake! – give Sherlock no peace and no satisfaction. He’s almost given up pretending he isn’t on edge (one idiotic remark too many from Anderson and only John’s startled expression at the look on his face prevents Sherlock from taking the SOCO’s stupid smug head off) and John has given up entirely on pretending to believe there’s a real case. Sherlock knows he must look a mess, seeing his behaviour and his appearance reflected in the lines in John’s face, the way John’s mouth has stopped tightening simply because it’s impossible for it to tighten any more.

(The cravings have become as familiar now as vultures in old spaghetti westerns, and Sherlock knows that were they to disappear tomorrow he would be intensely disconcerted, might even miss them as he misses old enemies and the fights at home.)

In the end, it’s an argument that does it, or rather a spat: John is inexplicably angry that Sherlock has been reading his therapist’s notes. He is irritated by the discovery of eyeballs yet again in the microwave (this time accompanied by a human finger, presumably by way of variety) and frankly furious at the fourth drugs bust this month frightening off the second girlfriend in a row.

John walks out, and somewhere far back in Sherlock’s mind the slamming door sounds exactly like the dull crumbling roar of a breaking dam.

In the end, it’s almost tauntingly easy to give in.

The dosage is too strong: he knows it the second the cocaine (it wasn’t difficult to hide it from Lestrade’s prying eyes) rushes into his veins. Sherlock has been clean now for three years, seven months, nine days, five hours and twenty-seven minutes, and the fix he has given himself is almost exactly the same as the amount he was imbibing when he needed that selfish drug almost every day. His brain crackles; every sensation is intensified, every sound almost deafening. Blood pounds in his ears; somewhere, it seems as if a badly-tuned radio is playing just out of sight but not out of mind, infuriating him. He spins out of his chair to find it and goes crashing to the floor in a gangly rag-doll heap.

(Sprawled, he wonders - as he has done before, in the midst of a drugs-haze - why they call it a fix. This fixes nothing.)

It’s in this position, giggling at nothing, that John finds him, several hours later (John returning to the flat if not penitent then at least ashamed of his outburst – Harry has been calling again, drunk and furious) and the remains of Sherlock’s so-called fix are engulfed by the sheer almost terrifying wave of John’s caring. The doctor is angry too, of course, and a little guilty even though he will tell himself a hundred times later that it is not his fault that his flatmate’s a maniac – sorry, a sociopath.

(He will tell himself _three_ hundred times, during the long sleepless night, that he had not noticed and noted – in the time between his heart stopping and rational thought kicking in to send him running for his medicine bag – the absurdly heartbreaking angle in the twist of Sherlock’s head and the nape of his neck.)

It occurs to Sherlock, being gently helped into bed as though John fears to break him, that this is yet another near-death experience that he won’t be telling John about (John will try to force the subject and subside into angry worries when he fails), but this very elementary fact has vanished in the wake of the aftershocking revelation that he has discovered a vice even more destructive – and a shade less acceptable – than the cocaine.


End file.
